Chapter 1 #18
“I’m sorry, Baronessa,” I said to her on a pay phone beside the mechanic’s.
I had managed to reach her at her hotel.
Giacomo-Giacomo stood outside, watching me as he smoked a cigarette.
I was terrified of her response—not only to our abandoning her in Ferrara, but also to our missing the restaurant reservation. “It won’t be ready until tomorrow!”
She simply did not believe me. She insisted the car was in perfect working order. “Gazelle told me so.”
“The mechanic says it needs a new belt or a fan.”
“A belt! Or a fan!” she said. “This is a very well-dressed car.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“You will miss an excellent meal.”
“Tomorrow we can—”
“I will take the train home,” she said firmly. “My business here is concluded and there is a train direct to Firenze. Savonarola will deliver me to the station here and you will arrange for Vinsanto to pick me up.”
That there was a direct train, all this time, and she knew of it, hardly surprised me. “What about the package? It’s too big for you to—”
“That is no longer of concern,” she said, then gave a sigh that surprised me. “You and my cousin must find a hotel until the car is ready.”
“I don’t know if there’s a hotel—”
“You can always stay with an eelwife.” Sometimes her solutions seemed to come from a novel and not life experience.
“I have fond memories of Comacchio. It feels like Dal Lake of Kashmir, where a boat comes every morning to replace your houseboat’s flowers.
Fifty years ago in Comacchio a fisherman loaned me his scarf on a bridge at sunset, and now I realize that I never returned it… ”
We did find a hotel in Comacchio, but it was filled with cyclists.
As were the two others. “Gara Nazionale,” intoned each desk clerk.
But at the Principessa della Delta, an elderly red-haired cleaning woman took Giacomo aside for a whispered conversation.
He turned to me with lifted eyebrows and explained that she rented a room in her house along the canal.
We stood patiently as she put away her cleaning things (Had we arrived precisely at the end of her shift?
Could coincidence be so cheap?) and bid us follow her down the canal past the Ponte di San Pietro, a brick bridge of incredible antiquity, the rough underside of which was covered in canal-reflected sun, creating bright scrivenings and loops of light that dazzled me.
The bridge was simple (I later learned it was from the seventh century) and I could so easily imagine the Baronessa viewing a sunset there and accepting a scarf from an admiring fisherman.
Perhaps fifty years ago, perhaps five hundred.
One can find the experience, in America, of standing where it seems no person has ever stood before—on a wilderness peak or a rocky, inaccessible shore—but seldom do we feel that thousands have stood there, for thousands of years, and empires have risen and fallen and will continue to do so long after we have gone.
The woman asked us to call her Nonna, and when I kept thanking her, she made a gesture of crumpling up a piece of paper and tossing it to the floor.
We followed Nonna, and her rheumatism, up the stairs of her small pink house to a bedroom, which she presented with the resignation of someone who assumes you have previously been forced to live in castles.
It was a mint-green room with built-in closets, painted with wreaths and roses.
Photographs of ballet dancers were arranged on the walls, each with a border of red velvet.
The night tables were white-painted wood, as was the matrimonial bed.
Giacomo looked at me and shrugged. “Vabon. Shall we get dinner?”
Because of the chill, I wore a newsboy’s cap I had bought at Formica. Giacomo said it made me look even more American. I asked how this was possible, and he said he could not explain. Except that I looked like an American trying to dress like an Italian.
“Why did your cousin want us to come here? Why not just go to Ravenna?”
“I’m sure she has some memory of the place.
A little story of hers, maybe.” By this time, I understood that “story” meant a romantic adventure, and I thought of the fisherman’s scarf.
Was it possible her “stories” were not confined, as I had imagined, to viscounts and princes?
It was sundown and I had said we should find the Baronessa’s bridge, which, as there were only three bridges, was not hard to achieve.
We found ourselves elbow to elbow in the cold, standing on a small bridge that looked onto an older bridge, curved like a carved-out melon, behind which lay a strip of canal leading to the lagoon.
The sun was nearly down, the horizon the deep purple of Villa Coco’s petunias, but, as often happens, the sky above had lightened as the land below grew dark, the canal waters as well, so there was just this dazzling pathway before us to some supernatural realm above.
To where? To the Venice we all are in secret?
Then the sunlight shifted, the radiance fell away, and the streetlights came on, one by one, bringing the ancient brick buildings back into view.
But when I turned, I saw that the brightness still remained, for a moment, on the round lenses of my companion’s spectacles. He moved and it was gone.
We found a restaurant called L’Anguilla C’e!
(“There’s Eel!”), decorated, on its roof, with a rusted metal sculpture of the aforementioned creature.
Inside was an enormous photograph of Sophia Loren dancing in Comacchio before a group of applauding fishermen.
When it was time to order, there was no doubt that we had to try the town’s specialty—because it was all there was on offer.
As at every restaurant meal in Italy, there was a long discussion of the food and wine with the owner (a thin, gray-haired woman), part of which Giacomo seemed to struggle with; he later explained she was teasing him in the local dialect, Comacchiese, so different from Italian that he understood not a word.
“February, for instance,” he said, giving me an example, “is not febbraio. It’s ferver.
Isn’t that something? Ferver!” I nodded.
I had only learned the Italian word for February the week before.
The owner suggested the house wine, which Giacomo declined (“I never drink unlabeled wine,” he whispered to me).
Instead, we had a bottle of Lambrusco, the fizzy red wine of the region.
“There’s Eel!” announced the sign outside, and indeed there was: eel marinated and grilled; as carpaccio and in a soup; in risotto and with pasta and polenta; smoky and tangy and tender and sweet.
Here on the menu was a dish I had never tasted before—had never imagined tasting—served as if there were no other ingredient on earth.
There are birds who have evolved to eat only one particular kind of fruit—and these were the Comacchese and their eel.
I repeated a fact I knew: “I heard the sex life of eels is a complete mystery.”
“What’s that?”
“Eels,” I said. “Their sex life is a complete mystery.” I took a swallow of wine. “All eels go to the Sargasso Sea to mate, but no one knows what happens there. They are the most discreet of all animals,” I finished, and Giacomo nodded with a bashful expression.
“Oscar says you are a romantic person.”
“He does?” I didn’t see myself this way at all.
“He says you should always have a young person or an American around because they believe the future will be better.”
“And Italians don’t?”
“We know it is not so. But it is nice to be around someone like this. I admit I am a little romantic. That…eh, ahem…I have an artistic side that I do not discuss with my cousin. It is that I am writing a novel.”
“A novel!” I said. “But I think she’d love that!”
“I think so as well, but she has known so many famous writers, I’m afraid I would disappoint her. I am also an editor and it seems unwise. But, yes, I take time every day to write a little something.”
“Can I ask what it’s about?”
He was shy despite the wine. “Vabon…eh, ahem…I can only say it’s a very romantic story. Set in my town, in Vicenza, but long ago.”
“It’s historical.”
“I have said too much. But, yes, there is something even about this place, don’t you think? The old bridge we passed. It is something I made note of, for my book.”
I asked, “Is there a beauty pageant rehearsal in your book?”
“Now you are teasing me.”
I apologized. The food arrived: Smoked eel with oranges.
Delicate, smooth, flaking on the fork but soft and unctuous in the mouth.
I looked to Giacomo and saw that his lips were coated in the oil, shining.
I was about to say something when music started.
A live band, out on the covered patio, with an accordion prominently playing.
I would have called it a polka band, but it seemed so unlikely—
“Liscio!” Giacomo exclaimed, grabbing my hand.
“You don’t know liscio?” I smiled and shook my head.
“It’s the music on the River Po! Look!” And indeed, through the window, I could see people were standing up, old couples holding each other two-step style and swaying to the rhythm.
A man with dyed black hair stepped out, took the microphone, and began to sing.
I could have been anywhere from Texas to Munich to Oaxaca.
Was it the influence of the Austrian Empire that brought the accordion to be so beloved?
Because those old couples clasped each other so tight.
We clapped and Giacomo sang along; I had forgotten he was from a nearby region, and he surely knew every word.
Watching his delight, I decided I had made a vow I could not keep.
He leaned forward and said something to me, and I could only say “Eh?”
Louder: “Estelle said all Americans are heartbreakers!”
I coughed; I could feel that I was a little drunk. “Why would she say that?”